For service renderedBone, Jesse F. (Jesse Franklin)
Science
For service rendered
Bone, Jesse F. (Jesse Franklin)
Fantasy fiction; Short stories
FOR SERVICE RENDERED
By J. F. BONE
Illustrated by COYE
_Are you dissatisfied with the programs that
come through your television set? Don't complain
too much. Look what came through Miss Twilley's!_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories April 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Television made Miss Enid Twilley's life endurable by providing the
romance which life had withheld. So when the picture tube in her
old-fashioned set blew out, it was a major crisis. But Ed Jacklin's
phone didn't ring. The spare twenty-eight inch tube in Jacklin's T.V.
shop remained undisturbed on the shelf. And the drawn shades of Miss
Twilley's living room gave no hint of what was happening behind them.
The town of Ellenburg went its suburban way unaware of the crisis in
its residential district.
Which was probably just as well.
Frozen with terror, Miss Twilley sat in spastic rigidity, her horrified
eyes riveted on the thing in front of her. One moment she had been
suffering emphatic pangs of unrequited love with a bosomy T.V. blonde,
the next she was staring into a rectangular hole of Cimmerian blackness
that writhed, twisted and disgorged a shape that made her tongue cleave
to the roof of her mouth and her throat constrict against the scream
that fought for release.
It wasn't a large shape but it was enormously impressive despite the
lime green shorts and cloak that partially covered it. It was obviously
reptilian. The red skin with its faint reticulated pattern of ancestral
scales, the horns, the lidless eyes, the tapering flexible tail, the
sinuous grace and Mephistophelean face were enough to identify it
beyond doubt.
Her television set had disgorged the devil!
Silence draped the room in smothering folds as Miss Twilley's frozen
eyeballs were caught and held for a moment by the devil's limpid green
eyes whose depths swirled for an instant with uncontrolled surprise.
The devil looked around the room, at the closed drapes, the dim lights,
the shabby furniture and the plate of cookies and the teapot on the
tray beside Miss Twilley's chair. He shook his head.
"No pentacle, no candles or incense, no altar, no sacrifice. Not even
a crystal ball," he murmured in an impeccable Savile Row accent. "My
dear young woman--just _how_ in Eblis' name did you do it? There isn't
a single sixth order focus in this room."
"Do what?" Miss Twilley managed to croak.
"Construct a gateway," the devil said impatiently. "A bridge between
your world and mine."
"I didn't," Miss Twilley said. "You came crawling out of the picture
tube of my T.V. set--or what was the picture tube," she amended as her
eyes strayed to the rectangle of darkness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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